Chapter Seven
Gabriel had been to Westminster Abbey before, as had most other people who’d spent any amount of time in London.
Though he’d never been the sort to pay too much attention to art or architecture, he recognized the place was grand and magisterial, a place of solemn reflection where kings and queens were anointed.
But when he arrived at the Abbey and found Caroline with her maid as chaperone, she wasn’t there to pray or to admire the flying buttresses. Rather, she was there to look for some dead bodies.
“Why do you want to do that?” Gabriel asked, nonplussed.
“I’d originally planned for an outing to the National Gallery, but I’d research to do that couldn’t wait. I don’t imagine we could pull back the coffin lid and look down on the bones of St. Edward,” she said briskly as they headed along the church’s echoing nave, her maid shaking her head and worrying her hands the entire time. “But I’d like an idea of how hard it would be for a human being trapped inside to push the lid off.”
“Why do you want to know that?” Gabriel was admittedly stunned by her. He’d thought he’d finally figured the girl out, and he’d been spectacularly wrong.
“Oh, relax. I’m not getting any ideas for you. Yet.” The woman was all mischief, and Gabriel struggled not to laugh. “It’s for a story I’m writing.”
“Yes, you’ve mentioned writing before. So you’re an author, then.” It was rare to find a woman whose hobby was writing. In Gabriel’s experience, most young ladies preferred embroidery or music.
“Yes. I’m quite fond of writing. I should like to publish one day.” She seemed a bit evasive as they turned onto the topic of her work.
“Well, I hope you succeed.” Gabriel’s voice echoed as they entered the Confessor’s chapel. A few other people were dotted about the place, enjoying the quiet and beauty of the area. They turned and frowned at him, hushed him. Gabriel responded by glaring. If you had a title, you could whisper in church. That had been expressly stated in the Magna Carta. “Though I’m surprised your plans regarding writing haven’t changed.”
“Why should my plans change?”
“If you’re to be a countess, you won’t need to worry about publishing, will you?” He apparently couldn’t have said anything to displease her more. All the merriment fled her expression, and the sparkle in her eyes dulled.
“Yes. Because a woman’s interests only extend as far as catching a husband. Once I’m your wife, why should I ever want to be or do anything else?”
Once again, Gabriel couldn’t figure her out at all. “You yourself have laid out in aching detail why it is so essential for a woman to be married.”
“Yes, but just because we need to do a thing, doesn’t mean it’s the only thing we want to do.”
He seemed to be forever rubbing up against her in the wrong manner.
If this was a preview of married life, then he hoped young Simon turned that letter up with haste.
Meanwhile, the young lady busied herself.
Caroline wandered about the chapel’s space, looking from tomb to tomb. Many of the great English kings and queens were buried in this chapel inside coffins of heavy stone and marble.
Gabriel watched in astonishment as Caroline walked straight up to the tomb of Edward the Confessor himself and began measuring herself against it.
Before everyone in the chapel, she stood on the tips of her slippered toes and stretched her arm as high above her head as she could manage.
“What the devil are you doing?” he hissed, coming up alongside her.
“In my book, the heroine enters a chapel much like this one and has to climb up the pedestal to look into the coffin itself. I’ve made her about my height, but I suppose she’ll need to be a bit taller if she’s to reach.”
“Why is she climbing into a coffin in the first place?” He blinked. “What kind of book are you writing, anyway?”
“A book about a young girl whose grandfather dies, leaving her his crumbling estate. It turns out that the place is haunted, presumably by her grandfather’s ghost, but people begin to believe the girl is mad when she talks about it. She comes to think her grandfather may not be dead after all—that he’s been manipulating events to make her seem insane. So she rushes to the tomb in the dark of night to see for herself if anyone’s inside.”
“Well. Is he?” Gabriel found she’d piqued his interest. His evident enthusiasm surprised her.
“Ah. Well. I’m not sure yet.”
“How can you not be sure?”
They were evidently being too loud for the other visitors, and a chorus of shushes rang out again.
“Writing is like any other bit of living one’s life,” Caroline explained with growing enthusiasm. Gabriel wondered how often, if ever, she got the chance to discuss such ideas. To the ton , young women shouldn’t philosophize in such a way. “You make a plan to do something, and then when the moment arises, perhaps you change your mind. Perhaps your day takes you in a totally new direction and you never even get the chance to do what you were so certain you’d do.”
It made a perverse sort of sense.
“So you know that she’s going to enter the tomb, but you’re still unsure what she’s going to find?” It made Gabriel’s mind spin a bit, but he found it all strangely enticing.
“You don’t think it odd?” Caroline looked puzzled.
“Of course I do. That’s why I find it fascinating.” Gabriel began to move around the Confessor’s tomb, whispering to Caroline as they walked and studied it. “That’s the way I’ve always approached life: it doesn’t matter what you thought was going to happen. Whatever’s there in the moment is what you’ve got, and you should deal with that, not sit around planning for things that may never occur.”
Once more, he fell back into a memory.
The last day he’d lived at Havenlock Hall as his father’s son.
The old earl had come upon Gabriel in the mews, learning from a stable boy how to properly treat and store the tackle after riding. Gabriel had always been curious about how to do things and had eagerly learned how to oil and treat the leather so it didn’t crack in the cold weather.
The earl had been furious to see his son, suspected bastard or not, dirtying his hands with such work. His father had struck the stable boy a terrible blow and fired him on the spot. So Gabriel, furious at the bullying, had walloped his father as hard in the stomach as he could. At twelve, the wallop was not terribly hard.
In response, the old earl had grabbed Gabriel by the scruff of the neck and beat him mercilessly across the backs of his thighs and buttocks with a rod. And after the thrashing, after Gabriel had been sent to his room without supper, he’d laid upon his stomach, his back smarting fearfully, and realized that the whole of his future had changed its course.
There would be no ancestral halls of Havenlock for him; no Cambridge; no life as a clergyman. In half an hour, his life hurtled down a whole other course.
Two days later, he’d escaped and taken a coach down south to Portsmouth and to a life at sea. Such change was something that hadn’t seemed possible in his upbringing. Yet he’d made it happen.
“Lord Rockford? Are you well?” Caroline looked concerned at his silence.
“Just thinking,” he replied.
“About what?”
“About how changing your life is entirely possible. Perhaps your book will do quite well. You never know what the future may bring.”
Caroline stopped dead, forcing Gabriel to stop, too. She clutched her reticule in a defensive manner, as though she needed something with which to defend herself. “Are you trying anything funny?”
“Funny? The devil do you mean?”
Caroline’s maid whimpered a bit at the unbridled, salty language the earl had used. Damn, he wished they didn’t need to worry about chaperones.
“Are you trying to say all the right things to manipulate me into letting down my guard? Or to make me feel guilt so I give you the letter back?” Caroline stuck up her chin in defiance. “Because if so, it won’t work.”
“Really? By your own admission, I’m doing everything right and yet it won’t work?”
“Must you twist everything I say? It’s infuriating!”
She was glorious when he irritated her; Gabriel wanted to pick more fights just to see her color deepen. The fact that they were arguing in a chapel, mere feet from a number of the most famous skeletons in England’s history, only made the whole thing better.
He’d anticipated that a life in the ton would bring endless routine and ritual, but he was currently arguing with a young woman who seemed the opposite of all that.
“Miss, I do believe people are watching.” The poor maid inserted herself between the two combatants. The girl looked almost woozy coming into the line of fire.
“Indeed. That must be just what you wanted, Miss Devereux. The whole of London’s sightseers astonished by the most unconventional outing in the ton ’s history.”
“It’s certain to get tongues wagging. What more could I hope for?” She continued to be difficult.
“Have you seen enough tombs for today?” Gabriel asked in an icy tone.
“Never. I shall stay here and study these tombs until I bloody well can’t stand any longer. And should you wish our plan to go smoothly, you will stay right by my side.”
“For certain I’ll remain.” Gabriel smirked. “Even if you crawl into one of those tombs and hug the bones of Eleanor of Aquitaine, I will stay and maintain polite, neutral conversation with you.”
“I don’t think Eleanor of Aquitaine is even buried here!”
“Oh my word.” The maid looked as though she really were about to faint; perhaps talking about crawling into coffins was too much for her.
“Oh, Phyllis. Do be calm,” Caroline whispered.
“Your maid seems to have taken a turn, Miss Devereux. If you’re like most employers of the ton , I’m certain you’ll tell her to stop making a spectacle of herself. If the poor girl faints, you may even use her as a cushion while you sit and scribble down your notes.”
“You really are horrid.” Caroline scowled at him, then steadied her maid by the elbow. “Should we go and sit down a moment?” She spoke much more gently to the girl.
“N-no, Miss, I’m able to st-stand.” The girl shrieked when someone let a prayer book fall, and the sound echoed about the walls. “S-sorry, Miss. Bein’ ’round the dead’s hard on me nerves.”
“Come on. Let’s go and sit.” Caroline didn’t scold the maid or groan. Instead, she took the girl back into the Abbey proper and bade her take a seat in a pew.
Gabriel could see that Caroline’s concern for the girl’s welfare was genuine. She smiled and spoke pleasantly as the maid recovered her nerves. It had been years since Gabriel had gone into a church, much less sat in a pew, but he slid in beside the women.
Now Caroline was sandwiched between her chaperone and the scoundrel courting her.
“I must say, this is the most original outing I’ve been on since I returned to London,” he said.
“Oh, stop mocking me.”
“I’m not mocking you.” He lowered his voice when someone in the back shushed him. “Do you often haunt tombs in an effort to do research? Or is it mere morbid fascination?”
Caroline hesitated, as if wondering how genuine his interest was. He hoped she could tell he was all sincerity.
“It became something of a habit of mine when I was sixteen,” she replied. “My father was relieved when it didn’t last too long. Eventually, I spun that ‘morbid fascination’, as you call it, into a calling.”
“Writing Gothic novels.”
“Some would think me silly or touched in the head, but writing gives me a purpose. It makes me feel fully alive.”
“I don’t think that’s silly.” Gabriel leaned nearer to her, spoke so softly no one else could hear him. “I think it’s admirable.”
The girl’s cheeks colored as she fidgeted with her reticule. This wasn’t the blush of anger as he’d seen before, or embarrassment; she was fighting off a small wave of pleasure. Caroline bit her lower lip in an effort to deter a smile.
What she needed was to be admired, he realized.
He thought again of her as he’d first met her, smeared with ink, her hair coming undone. She needed to be discovered in that same rather disheveled state and then kissed until she was breathless. Caroline ought to be told that she herself, in her every moment, was bloody gorgeous and exciting.
“I…” As if sensing that something heated and unspoken was passing between them, Caroline choked out her next words. “I…started writing soon after my mother died.”
That certainly put a damper on desire.
“I’m very sorry,” Gabriel said.
“I was always deemed a bit odd by my father and brothers, but after Mamma passed away I became obsessed with stories of ghosts and hauntings.” Caroline sighed. “It started because I wanted so badly to see her again, and then something stirred in my imagination. It made me want to write down stories of my own. I like to think she would have been proud of my talent, such as it is.”
“You loved her very much,” Gabriel said.
Caroline brightened a bit. “I did. She was always so good, so thoughtful. I don’t believe she ever considered herself for a moment, not until the rest of us were looked after. She knew how to run a household with absolute precision.” Caroline’s posture slumped ever so slightly. For a young lady, it was a shocking display of casualness, and that thrilled Gabriel. “She taught me much about governing a household while she was alive, but none of it stayed with me. I’m no natural at it, not like she was. I forget important things all the time, I’m terrible at math, my needlework’s poor. Every single thing I’m supposed to be good at, I’m tragic.”
“Indeed. You seem the perfect choice for a countess.” He meant it to tease, but she winced.
“I’m sorry for that. I know I’m not what anybody wants. I’ve had that made quite plain to me the last few years.”
Gabriel felt another flush of anger on her behalf.
“You forget you were only a girl when your mother died,” Gabriel said. “You can’t be too hard on yourself. I’m sure there was more you needed to learn.”
“Was it the same for you, then?” She seemed defensive now, as though he’d been making some kind of sly attack. The woman was so constantly ready for battle, she put the English navy to shame. “You were the second son, after all. There can’t have been much you learned before the former earl passed.”
“There wasn’t.” Gabriel was happy to be honest with her. “I’ve spent these past six months struggling to come to terms with it all. It certainly didn’t help that I was traveling the world from twelve to two-and-twenty.”
“Why did you stay away from England so long, exactly? Even if there’s nothing to inherit, most second sons stay nearby. They go to Oxford, enter the church, take up the law, or marry a wealthy heiress.”
“I stayed away because of my father,” Gabriel said. “Because I hated him.”
It was not hard for Gabriel to say those words, and he saw them have the intended effect. Caroline stiffened, and her breathing stuttered. It was so rare to use words like “hate” or “love” in this society, rarer still to mean them.
“Having read that letter, I can certainly understand your feelings.”
“I didn’t just hate him because he hated me. Everything he did made life so much harder on my mother and my poor brother, Philip.”
“What did he do that was so wrong?” she whispered.
“You’ve just shown me that you’re quite the innocent, Miss Devereux.” Gabriel felt wicked as he leaned nearer to her; it was a degree of corruption, what he was telling her. Part of him hesitated to speak of such things to a young lady, but Caroline was more than a standard lady of the ton . “The old Earl of Rockford was one of the worst libertines in English history. His week-long ‘parties’ up at Havenlock Hall have gone down as legend amongst the gentlemen of the ton .” Even though they were in a church and he ought to have some mind for her innocence, if not prying eyes, Gabriel continued. “They brought women from any and everywhere. Courtesans, ladies of the street, dairymaids, other men’s wives, it made no difference. All comely members of the fairer sex were welcome at Lord Rockford’s events.”
Caroline clutched her reticule tightly. This near to her, Gabriel inhaled the gentle, floral notes of her perfume. She was scented in peach blossoms, all fruitful innocence. Her breathing quickened as he continued his lecherous suggestions.
“They say that after a while no one could recall what day it was, let alone the time. Some men are reputed to have even forgot what year they were in. There was only wine, feasting, hunting, and games.”
“What sort of games?” Caroline breathed.
Even Gabriel could only go so far with someone like her. Someone untouched by the debauchery of life. “Let us just say that my father was a great fan of indoor sport. As a result, I can’t imagine how many natural children of his are placed around the country. I wouldn’t be shocked if I’d half siblings in every county in England, not to mention Scotland and Wales.” Gabriel felt it was darkly ironic. Old Lord Rockford had sired dozens of bastards; only too fitting his seat had been inherited by one not of his own blood.
“Well. Given your reputation, it sounds rather like he’d be your hero. Not someone you hated.”
Gabriel froze. Did she truly think so little of him? He could be a rough thing, true, but did she take him for some unfeeling monster?
“You think that because you don’t know me well at all,” he replied coolly. “My mother, my elder brother, and I were all forgotten. My mother in particular had to endure shame as her husband indulged himself before the ton . My brother, Philip, was the better son; he was the best of all of us, really.” Thinking of Philip was always a pain beneath Gabriel’s ribs, right near the heart. “He worked every day to prepare himself to take over for our father. When I looked at him, I saw a good future for our family; I didn’t need to do anything to help build that. So with nothing to do but get out of the way, I found all I was good for was hating the old goat who’d shamed us all in the first place.”
“My word.” Caroline appeared shocked. Even the maid was wide-eyed and covertly straining to hear more.
“That’s why I was gone such a long time. Even when I returned to England, I rarely stopped to look in on Philip and my mother. So when Philip came down with consumption, the news was more than a blow.”
Gabriel found the words now caught in his throat. It had been such a pain, coming to Philip’s bedside and seeing the once healthy, bright-eyed young man lying there pale and soaked in sweat. As much as he was allowed, for three months Gabriel sat with his brother, feeling worse with every passing day. Knowing that he’d spent much of his life apart from Philip, knowing there was no way to get those years back now.
“It was a blow because you knew you had to become the earl now?” Caroline asked.
“In a way. But it was a blow because he was the only person I’d ever fully respected, and now he was leaving.” Gabriel hadn’t intended for that admission to get so raw. Well, if you were going to confess something, you could choose a worse venue than a church.
“I’m sorry,” Caroline whispered.
“Philip asked me to keep the estate together. To restore our good name. We have power and money, which makes the ton fear us, but we no longer have respect. Not after my father enjoyed himself so much at our expense,” Gabriel muttered.
“You promised Philip,” she said, nodding. “And that’s why you’ll do anything to keep the Rockford name from scandal. Even marry me.”
“You’ve got the whole of it now.”
Caroline worried her lip a moment. “I’m sorry, my lord. I think I understand you better now. You’re not quite as brutal as I first allowed myself to believe.”
She clearly approved of him. Gabriel was shocked at how gratified he felt at that realization. In an effort to set her off-kilter again, he decided to tease her.
“Oh, that’s where you’re wrong,” Gabriel whispered. “I’m more brutal than you can imagine.”
Gabriel ran one finger along the inside seam of her glove, from the tip of the thumb to the wrist. Caroline stiffened but maintained her composure.
She was so sensitive to his touch. That thought alone intrigued him.
“Just when I was beginning to respect you,” she murmured.
“I don’t want your respect. I don’t need it.” He studied the curl of blond hair that peeked out at him from beneath her bonnet. The smallest parts of her, from the seam of her glove to an errant curl, held more erotic fascination for him than any naked woman he’d ever seen.
The devil’s happening to me?
“What do you need, then, my lord?” she asked.
You. It was the first word that entered his mind. I need you and your smart mouth. You and your curls and your ink splatters.
“I need you,” Gabriel said, “to go home and prepare yourself. Tomorrow, it’s my turn to choose the outing.”
“Yes. Shall we visit another church?”
“On the contrary. I’m planning something the opposite of holy.”
He relished how Caroline attempted to hide her obvious pleasure at his words.